Blog Hogs

JUST ANOTHER WEEKEND OF HOCKEY

04/02/2012 11:11 AM - Mike Peck

Sunday’s brawl and shootout victory in Milwaukee concluded one of the craziest weekend’s of IceHogs hockey in recent memory. Taking the bench-clearing brawl out of the equation for a second, having three shootouts in three days with teams in the middle of a playoff push was unreal!

The funny thing is, the two games Rockford won (Friday and Sunday) were two games that I felt that the team could have lost, while the game they lost in the shootout (Saturday), they controlled and could have won.

Now back to the 20 on 19 melee at the Bradley Center. Rockford had 19 because Rostislav Olesz left the game in the first period with an injury. Here is the video board feed of the scrap: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SVSc9iJ4c4

Check out the 3:00 mark of the video. The overheard camera catches the start of the fight when Rob Flick approaches Jeremy Smith and Smith attacks Flick. Milwaukee clearly gets to the scrum first as at one point Rockford is outnumbered about 10 to 4.

Die hard IceHogs fans might remember the big brawl at the BMO Harris Bank Center back in the IceHogs inaugural season in 1999-2000 with Quad City in the UHL. That happened as the teams were skating back to the locker room for the intermission.

The donnybrook in Milwaukee happened out of a promotional timeout and Flick and Smith were going at it for at least five seconds before anyone was able to join the party because all the players were still at the benches.

There will be suspensions from this, including more than likely Shawn Lalonde and Michael Latta for leaving the penalty boxes. They actually fought at 10:08 before the scrum, which sent the game into the promotional timeout.

So needless to say, I’ve never seen anything like that live and fans will be talking about this for years to come!

The most important thing is the Rockford is still in the playoff picture and right now is sitting better than they have all season. Needless to say that this weekend’s two games in Lake Erie are huge and the IceHogs need two more victories to stay close.